I'm assuming, dear reader, that you've seen Child's Play. That's a pretty safe assumption. If you're combing the internet lookiung for obscure horror films like the ones I write about, chances are you've either seen all the most influential mainstream horror films already, or have chosen not to for some reason. Either way, I'm sure you won't mind if I go over the details of the original film, so I can illustrate how the various Indian version compare. We need to have this common frame of reference if this discussion of the Indian films are going to make any sense at all.

The American film starts with the pursuit of a serial killer named Charles Lee Ray (Brad Dourif), also known as "Chucky". Ray is an unusual serial killer in that he works with an accomplice; but Ray's motivations are also different from your run-of-the-mill mad strangler. He's bent on killing a certain number of people as a sacrifice to the voodoo gods, in order to gain eternal life. We learn all this very gradually over the course of the film; originally, there was to be some exposition at the start of the movie that made Ray's back story clearer to us, but this material was cut from the final version. The absence of this material explain why the first time we see Mike Norris (Chris Sarandon), the cop in pursuit of Ray, he's wearing a dress.

Anyway: when Ray stumbles into a police trap set by Sarandon, his accomplice panics and leaves him behind. Ray attempts to find shelter in a toy store, but is fatally shot before he can make his escape. As he dies, he grabs a doll from a display — this year's hottest item, a talking "Good Guys" doll named Oliver — and begins chanting a sinister incantation. Soon strange swirling clouds appear in the sky over the toy shop... the store is hit by a colossal bolt of lightning, which causes it to explode. Ray's body is found next to the doll at the center of the blast.

The next day, stressed-out single mom Karen (Catherine Hicks) is overjoyed when she's able to buy a slightly-singed "Good Guys" doll at an enormous discount, from a homeless guy in the alley outside the department store where she works. She brings it home as a birthday present for her very young son Andy, who is unusual among horror-movie children in that he thinks and behaves very much like a real child.

It isn't long before Andy confides that his talking Oliver doll is actually named "Chucky", and that he has some very specific and strangely un-doll-like ideas. For example, Andy says Chucky wants to stay up and watch the evening news report about the death of a notorious serial killer, and the escape of his cohort... and when the babysitter insists he stop being a naughty boy and playing tricks after bedtime, things go very badly for the babysitter indeed.

Karen comes home to find her friend dead on the pavement and her apartment full of police. It certainly looks as though someone very small and very dangerous took a toy hammer to the babysitter's head and then knocked her out the window to her death. It's only the sheer unlikeliness of little Andy's being involved that stops Norris from arresting him at the scene.

Norris gets some more food for thought the next day, when Andy skips school — he says Chucky told him to — and takes the El out to a sketchy neighborhood. Andy puts Chucky down to go have a pee against a nearby wall (hey, everybody else around there seems to do it, too), but when he returns, Chucky is gone. Shortly thereafter, a nearby building — which just happens to be the place where Ray's cowardly accomplice is hiding — goes up in a gas explosion. The police find boy and doll at the scene. What is the meaning of this?

The most likely inference is that Andy is a distubed little boy with homicidal tendencies... and to the movie's credit, if it doesn't really allow us to think that Andy really is the killer, it does hint at first that Ray's possession of the doll may be more spiritual than physical, and that Andy really may be doing the actual murders. All that is dispelled when Andy is locked away in a mental hospital for "evaluation", and Karen discovers that Chucky's been walking and talking without any batteries.

In the meantime, Chucky's discovered that his doll form is becoming more and more fragile. He's starting to feel pain, and when he's shot he bleeds — not normally what you'd expect from a chunk of plastic. He goes to see his old voodoo instructor, who's at first horrified and then pleased to see his old student reduced to such a state. Ray had misused the teachings of his religion, and now he's trapped in the shape of a pathetic plastic doll... but a doll that's becoming ever more human, and ever more vulnerable. But Ray knows a little more than his teacher had expected, and soon has the voodoo master lying broken on the floor pleading for his life. Ray learns that he can assume human form again by possessing the first human he revealed himself to — little Andy.

That's about all the background you need on Child's Play to deal with its Indian versions... though I should probably point out that it is one of very few horror films that goes out of its way to address the question of what they're going to tell the police as the movie comes to an end. It does have its share of script problems — how, for instance, does our struggling single mom afford her spacious top-floor Chicago apartment? Maybe it's where she lived with her late husband in happier times, and the upkeep of an apartment that she's unwilling to leave is one of the reasons she struggles? Evidently the explanation is yet another thing that was left on the cutting-room floor, along with Ray's back-story in the exposition. But overall, Child's Play does a very good job making a ridiculous concept not only believeable, but frightening.